Enchantment
by Aveza
Summary: "Don't think that it's just your DNA unraveling when we stand in a room-that because you are small, because you are gentle, you have no influence over anyone or anything bigger than yourself. You. All of you. You are undoing me as I speak." [Takari AU, One-shot]


**A/N****: Okay… So, this is a companion fic to my other short story "Baby Octopus," which is based loosely off of the Adventure 02 epilogue and****_ends_****with a Daikari pairing.**

**However, Takari****_is_****mentioned in "Baby Octopus," and as a Takari fan, I thought I'd give it its own limelight. So, here is the story behind that bit. I hope you like it. I'll admit that Takeru is slightly OOC. My interpretation of him here is a tad more playful.**

**Any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. you may have are most welcome! :)**

**Happy Reading!**

xXx

_Enchantment_

xXx

**T**hey met because of a school tradition. Career Day, otherwise known as Take Your Parent(s) to School Day, was an occasion treated by her first grade students with the same euphoric mania reserved for national holidays. In the days leading up to it, she caught remnants of her students' gabbled expectations. They were the usual: bragging battles, cyclical insistences that so-and-so job was 'cooler' than such-and-such occupation. Some even went out of their way to seek her for a supporting opinion, arms flailing and mouths yelling, "Teacher! Teacher!" because they hadn't mastered the syllables of her last name.

When the day finally arrived, her students were charged with an excitement befitting their nature and age. Eagerly, they led the 'old people' through the kingdom that was primary school. The morning was filled with twenty different tours of the classroom, her students guiding their stooping parents by the hand, taking them to the various academic continents—the reading corner cushioned with pillows and plush bears, their humble, paint-smeared art gallery, the rows of cubbies filled with their belongings from home. Tiny fingers pointed to name tags as if to say, "Look. Here I am."

Class settled once she stood at the front of the room and called out to her brood, moving her hands up and down in a tempering manner as if she were petting the heads of several bouncing puppies. One-by-one, the line of parents awkwardly introduced themselves and recited speeches about their corporate jobs, or medical professions, or civil services. Her eyelids drooped as the minutes ticked by.

The last parent to present seemed too young to be grouped with the other adults. His hair was a brassy blond, short but shaggy. Unlike many of the other men in attendance, who boasted loose, round bellies or embarrassing muscular bulkiness, his frame was spare, bordering on drug addict thin. He did not come arrayed in a fine, silk suit or an ironed work shirt. His dark wash jeans sported jagged-edged holes, and his faded green button-up could have used a good ironing.

Her students pummeled him with questions, more than any of the other parents. _What are you?_they asked. She tried to imagine him the way her students did. Here before them was some mythical being, his youth and his dishevelment marking him an alien in the line of cookie cutter adults. _Why did you choose it? How much money do you earn? Do you like your job?_

She was curious herself. Her legs uncrossed. The pen that had thus far been absently twirled in her fingers hovered its inky tip over a blank notepad.

_"I'm a writer,_" he replied, leaning casually on the chalkboard. Without pause, he answered the rest of their questions in sequence: _"I'm a writer because writing lets me work from home, which means I can stay in my pajamas. I don't find exchanging money for books a fair trade. Give me your attention instead. No. I don't like my job. I love it. I adore it. I wake up every day enthralled with what I do._"

The silence that followed fell on them like a wave, flooding their ears and muddling all cohesive thought. She knew what the feeling was like, to have twenty pairs of eyes blinking owlishly in your presence. It was an odd and terrifying position of power, to blatantly witness the influence one had on developing minds. He only smiled, gratified, enjoying the stupor he had created.

She looked down at her notepad.

_Give me your attention instead_, he had said.

The words echoed in her skull, and she was surprised to find she had answered his call.

In her own perfect cursive, she had written:

"_Well, you have it_."

Most parents left soon after they presented themselves, but the blond stayed, sitting in a chair too small for him beside the only fair-haired student in her class, a girl. He wasn't alone, either. On the other side of her student's desk was a slim woman with red hair, newly pregnant judging by the subtle roundness of her belly. She had introduced herself as both fashion designer and stay-at-home mom, and her smile was too pleasant and her words spoken too gently for her to possess so fiery a hair color. She was, all superficial things considered, an odd mix.

Odder still that she was paired with an emerging writer who looked more boy than man—not that she herself was qualified to shed such judgments. It was a near insufferable trial to go to the bank to deposit her paychecks. The tellers would look at her quizzically, wondering where her guardian was. Some, those well-aged, with gleaming dentures, faces like chipping tree bark, and hands as gnarled and leathery as witches', would ask her if she would like a lollipop after each transaction; and she was too polite and too relinquished to her fragile image to ever decline.

"Thank you for taking the time to speak to my class," she said after the bell had rung. Her blond student lingered behind with her chaperones, jumping ecstatically in their midst before bounding over to her. The girl embraced her tightly, squeezing her around the waist.

She patted the girl affectionately on the head.

"But that's not my dad," the girl said bluntly, pointing at the blond. "My dad's in space! This is my uncle."

Color bled into her cheeks. A hand rose to the mouth that gaped for words. Her eyes shifted back and forth between the writer and the redhead.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I…"

"It's all right," the woman said. She nudged her brother-in-law playfully with her elbow. "He wanted to come to… What was it you said?"

"Corrupt young minds," he finished evenly, though he wasn't looking at his sister-in-law. He was looking at her. His blue eyes were possessed of a little spark, the corners almost twitching, silently daring her to defend the sanctity of her profession.

She was reminded of his speech earlier, the glibness with which he spoke, his tongue brushing subtle strokes of mischief under each of his replies. How easily she had been ensnared by his incantation.

"I suppose you can't receive all the credit for that," she replied, extending her hand in both a gesture of truce and welcome. His blue eyes widened only minimally, the intrigue expertly checked.

She smiled as his hand slipped into hers.

"I enabled you."

xXx

Her free time in the following week was spent reading his works. Most were short stories of the neo-fantasy kind. They blended the magical with the mundane, the bizarre with the banal. In the worlds he created, wizards and dragons and fairies still had power, which made them all the more dangerous but also more fascinating. He made you believe that such potent beings lived in your midst, stood behind you in line at the grocery store, drank mechanically from mocha frappuccinos, and paced the emptinesses of their apartments fussing over human problems—of their purposes in life, of why they remained yet unloved, of the promises they had broken. He gave phantoms flesh, supple and pliant.

One night, after she had read the last story of his published collection, she set the closed book in the empty space beside her on her bed. She was curled up on her bed, housed in the circle of light given off by the lamp on her nightstand, her fingertips roving over the book cover repeatedly like a blind woman reading brail. It was a thin volume, not heavy enough to make a dimple in her sheets, but its memory left imprints in the fissures of her brain. Her eyes, when they flitted off the cover, stared into the shadow of her room. The blurred outlines of her furniture—the dresser, the vanity, the mirror on the wall—lurked like mysteries in the dark awaiting revelation.

Quietly, she crept out of bed and gathered her notebook computer, setting it on the incline of her lap as she leaned against the headboard. Carefully, his name was typed into a search engine. In the screen's white glow, she discovered he was the same age as she, a graduate of an obscure liberal arts school. His author's headshot was in black and white, dulling the blue of his eyes to a lackluster grey. He hadn't looked at the photographer and instead had elected to steer his gaze elsewhere, staring at some entity that would only exist in the viewer's imagination. A visit to his website, and she learned that he spent most of his time between Tokyo and Paris.

She fell asleep with her lamp on, and her head lay heavily on her pillow, bloated with strange dreams—of objects obtaining life, air gaining substance. She envisioned herself both flying great distances and roaming the confines of a gothic castle. Alone, she saw herself traveling murky corridors armed with one lit candle, a hand stretched out and waiting for the touch of soft gauze to lift away.

The morning woke her rudely. Splinters of sun spiked through her window. She had woken up late.

It was a misfortune so rarely experienced that she couldn't remember the last time she had slept through her alarm. Her limbs moved sluggishly, drugged by an eventful slumber. A quick glance at her cell phone revealed a missed call from her older brother, who had left a voicemail in which he worriedly asked if she was all right. On her way out of her apartment to her car, she called him, pinning the phone between her ear and shoulder, one hand meanwhile stuffing lesson plans into a tote emblazoned with the school's mascot. Her free hand fingercombed the hair she hadn't had time to wash as she explained to him that she had overslept.

After her brother sighed his despondent, "Take care," she shifted the gear to reverse and backed out of the lot. Her pale brown eyes glimpsed briefly at her reflection in the rearview mirror, the hand not gripping the wheel delicately rubbing her cheek, smoothing the indents left by her wrinkled sheets.

Her day progressed terribly, and she wondered if oversleeping intrinsically required that the next twenty-four hours be filled with shit. Her students were abnormally wild, brandishing their disdain for authority with countless cries, interruptions, and petty disputes among their peers. They were imps, sprites wrecking havoc on the order the adult world so craved. They became agents of destruction, juvenile and innocent.

When the bell finally rang and her children lined up to board busses or reunite with loving parents, she sighed grandly, unaware that one of her students still remained in the classroom. It was the blond girl, her golden hair cut tomboyishly short, her blue eyes staring at her in awe. What a strange thing, she must have thought, to see her teacher express exhaustion.

Minutes passed, and the girl remained with her, sitting on a stool beside her desk. Little legs swung idly over the seat edge while she tidied up the classroom. The girl was silent for the most part, speaking only to explain that her father was coming home from the space station, and her mother wouldn't be available to pick her up. Her uncle was to come get her.

He arrived approximately a half hour after the bell, and he entered briskly so that a breeze was sent into the room. She had been erasing her chalkboard clean of the day's lessons and turned once to acknowledge him, a look that was not returned. Silently, she went back to her task, swishing the felt brick in her hands across the black, grainy surface.

"I'm sorry to keep you waiting," she heard him say. His niece humorously replied to him with a motherly scold.

"You should be. My teacher's had to wait with me all this time!"

To which he attached:

"And it's Friday, too, right? I'm a horrible person!"

A silence followed, the air muted with the awkward expectation of reprieve. He might have cleared his throat, or his niece might have said a few encouraging words. There was no way to tell. Her erasing arm slowed as a strange sensation raced up her spine—that of being watched. Not in the way a wolf stalked its prey under cover, but the way a lady of high ranking merited the admiring glances of lower peoples, men and women alike.

Timidly, she glanced over her shoulder. He stood a few feet away from her, his niece in his arms, her desk dividing them. His eyes were so clear, so laughing a blue, that he almost seemed insincere in the request that eventually left his lips.

Her reply came without the usual pause she was accustomed to applying. She had always been wary when it came to fulfilling men's wishes of her, simply because she believed she was too small and too insignificant to warrant their attention—least of all the romantic kind. Her fragility was not a trait she denied, but accepted, though there was a fine line between acceptance and dependence. Sometimes it was her excuse to say no.

This time, it was not.

The way he smiled at her after she had given her answer, gratitude glinting off perfect white teeth, one corner of his mouth raised higher than the other, suggested a forbidden liaison of sorts, as if they had just shared secrets. She wondered if he could tell, just by looking at her, that she had read his stories, stroked words and letters issued by his hands, fell asleep beside his rendered fantasies. It terrified her to think her admiration could leak out like sweat.

Their first meeting was just to get coffee. He drank his like a girl, with three sugars and three creams, while hers was taken black, minimally sweet, enough to get her to swallow it without puckering.

Conversation was inhibited and polite. They asked each other the usual questions: '_How long have you been writing? How long have you been teaching? Where did you go to school? Class of…?_' He spoke animatedly, gesticulating as if his fingers were covered in webs and he was perpetually trying to unravel them. His niece—her student—served as the seed from which all other talk sprouted. They did not experience the great interims of silence that would leave them twiddling their thumbs in their laps like sexually frustrated teenagers. She avoided the female tendency of continuing dying conversation with more bootless inquiries.

"She loves it when you read aloud to them," he told her, again referring to his niece. "You put on voices, you wear hats, you get in character. '_He do the police in different voices,_'" he quoted, chuckling to himself before glancing at her, checking to see if she had passed his literary test.

Daintily, she stifled a laugh behind a hand, peeking at him while the correct answer was murmured through her fingers.

"I'm a teacher," she explained afterwards. "Learning is supposed to be an adventure. I want all of my students' senses to be engaged when I teach."

He smiled thinly and scratched the back of his neck, one hand circling the warm circumference of his coffee cup.

"The world needs more people like you." He said it with an uncommon touch of graveness, dismissing the possibility that it had been uttered to flatter her. Biting her lip, her mind strove to conjure a reply both intelligent and thoughtful. Nothing was coming. Thoughts failed to assemble. He saved her from the embarrassment of being at a loss for words.

"Your take on learning is exactly the same I have for my writing," he said, his tone gathering levity. "It's an…" He teased her with a tantalizing pause. "…_adventure_."

The word was drawn out, piercing the air like the blare of a trumpet. Her posture improved incrementally at the introduction of his forte into their discourse, and she was right to be alarmed. A wild look invaded his eyes—not savage—but free, loose, ecstatic. He was staring at her, and yet, not staring. His eyes bored into her own, as if by gaze alone he could feel her from the inside out, map out her body in his mind before he delved deeper and took a dive into her soul.

She could feel her pulse throbbing in a vital artery in her neck, her consciousness teetering on the precipice of her curiosity. To have a writer explain himself to her felt oddly akin, and just as taboo, to a magician revealing how he performed his tricks.

"I want your attention," he said cryptically, his stare still both distant and near, enough so that she knew he didn't mean _her_ specifically. This 'your' was inclusive and exclusive, coupling her with its definition while extending it beyond her bounds. "I want to arrest your soul, make you feel like the world is much bigger than you could have ever imagined." He softened, leaning forward, almost to a leer. When he continued, his words were at a near whisper, breathing upon her ear like a spell.

"That you, too, are far greater than a mere bag of bones and skin. It's amazing, that feeling. It's ridiculous. It's…"

"Irrational," she finished, closing what sounded like recited poetry.

The charm was broken. He straightened his back, his lips twisting into a grin. For a few seconds he studied her, squinting, as if her face would reveal whether or not she meant to insult or encourage him. It had been the latter, but she practiced caution, knowing her susceptibility to his unique enchantments.

He laughed, and the blue storm of his eyes ignited with a flash of lightning. His voice gained rapturous thunder.

"But it's invigorating!" he rejoiced. "So rejuvenating!" The smile on his face was jubilant, and he lowered his head and peered at her, speaking conspiratorially:

"It's also awful," he began. "And I mean that in the most literal sense. It inspires awe and fear—this idea that you can defy the laws of physics. And people tell me I can't think like that, that to think like that is insane, inconsiderate, idealistic. But who cares? What is so wrong with believing that we are more than organic material?" He pulled disgustedly at his shirt sleeve. "Flesh that can rot? Bones that will be bleached in the sun? People describe love in the same nonsensical manner, but no one says, 'No, don't talk about love like that.' No one wants love to be talked about so flatly that it becomes a pancake. So why not literature? Why not fiction?" He paused, a contemplative wrinkle engraved into his brow, his revelations amazing him into broadening his boyish smile.

Her eyes stung from staring unblinkingly at him, her breath choked up in her throat, her body refusing to breathe.

He asked her, rhetorically, "Why not share this vision with me?" unaware that her response had been surrendered, her reply written in the pages of her mind:

'_I already do_.'

The next couple of times they met never left so deep an impression on her as the first. That first night felt like someone had set her aflame from the inside, cleansing by way of fire, clearing room for whatever would soon follow. She went to bed feverish, woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, a tightness in her legs, her dreams aswirl with flashes of blue eyes and of hands traveling to parts of her yet unexplored.

He began to frequent her classroom, coming in too soon, before the bell had rung. He would have to pause, shift gears, and walk in reverse out the door, much to the amusement of her students and herself. One time he arrived while she was in the middle of reading a fairy tale to the class. She caught a peek of him leaning against the door frame, arms folded across his chest, titillated as he listened to her breathe life into words until the closing line was uttered, '_The End._'

They would speak or flirt once her students had left—he, stealing pieces of her chalk, she, laughing behind a hand at every appropriate moment—though he was never particularly physical with his attraction. He didn't put his hand on her waist or try to sneak a kiss from her. The air surrounding them filled with their secret desire, almost to the point where she could smell it, its odor making her pupils dilate and her pulse race.

One day, they found themselves speaking in her classroom well into the evening. The hallways had long been vacated, the sounds of laughing children and frantic teachers replaced with the squeaking wheels of the custodian's cart and the hum of a distant vacuum cleaner. He faced her, his back resting against the chalkboard. She sat on the edge of her desk. A lull had been reached in their conversation, and in the silence that permeated the room, her stomach growled. He laughed.

"Let's grab dinner," he said.

With a timid smile, she accepted the hand he offered her, let the touch of his skin rest in curve of her palm. They surprised themselves with their appetites at the restaurant. Complimentary bread rolls given at the start of their meal were devoured. They swallowed swills of wine, ate ravenously, even purchased dessert and, still, afterwards, felt destructively hungry. The meal was unsatisfactory—delicious, but poor sustenance. She offered to make him tea, and he agreed, tricked into thinking the steaming water and sweet smell of wet, blooming flowers would soothe him, calm him, dampen the pounding of his heart.

It astounded her how little they spoke as the night wore on. Barely a syllable was uttered as he sat at her kitchen table, she, meanwhile, flitting in and out of the kitchen to check on the water that took eons to boil. If he wished to tell her, demurely, that it was fine, he didn't need the tea, she would have blessed him profusely, but he remained in his chair, a finger idly tapping the rim of his teacup. His right leg bounced infinitesimally under the table.

The water never made it to the teapot. She could still remember the whistle of the kettle as steam blew furiously out of the spout, the scream piercing her ears as his mouth met hers, gentle, inviting, and filled with the type of warmth that deliquesced like a sweet on the tongue. Her fingers gripped the edge of her kitchen counter, the sharp line digging into the base of her spine as he pressed closer, their heartbeats fused in perfect, throbbing harmony.

The air in her lungs was exhausted. She escaped him once to turn off the stove, and then he took her by the hand, leading her through her own home, down the unlit hallway. It was as though she had dipped back into her dream, wandering an unfamiliar fortress, guided solely by one light. When would she find the curtain to draw away? she wondered as they vanished into the shadows. When would her fingers touch the gauze of the veil she would lift?

The darkness of her room was suffocating, plugging up all her senses save one. It was just his hands on her, tracing stories over her body, just words written in the wet cavity of her mouth. How deeply she sank beneath him, imbibed by the tenderness of his touch, lost in the chronicle being created, the surface on which it was related a soft, lush place, its aroma earthy, damp, as if they were doing it on a patch of dewy grass, outside, in the rain.

This was the fantasy that filled her—firm, tangibly unreal, solid as sand. It almost brought her to tears when it was over, reality and his breath settling on her like dust.

They both shook as if stricken with cold, and her bed sheets were parted. He draped them over their bodies like the celestial mantle that hovered protectively over allied realms, leaving them to rest contentedly beside their neighbor, fingertips touching, sweating lightly, and his forehead against her brow, defeated by delight.

In the morning, she was surprised to find him still in her bed, awake and sifting through her copy of his published collection of stories. His mouth was curled in a smirk like a person entertained in an engaging conversation.

She rolled over and, after a hesitant pause, rested her head on his shoulder, smiling thinly when he responded by slipping his arm around her waist. Her eyes watched him in short wonder, the fringes of his golden hair looking afire in the bright daylight, his blue eyes marked with lucid streaks of brilliance.

It was then that she confessed, timorously, that she had read his works. The question that followed was expected and asked without his eyes leaving the page.

"Well, what'd you think?"

She was honest with her replies. She knew she was in no danger of insulting him or of sending him on a downward spiral of depression because she did not rain praise on his life's work. He was an established writer, fixed in his ways, convinced of his talent and also of his imperfection.

"You ask for a lot," she told him. He turned the next page slowly, pensively, and ultimately never glanced at the scrawl she had written in the margins. Instead, his stare shifted to her, an eyebrow raised in curiosity as he awaited an elaboration.

She sat up, her back supported by pillows and the headboard.

"You place your readers in tough positions," she began, "requesting that they forego ingrained prejudices in order to fully digest your meaning. I don't know if I can relate to the werewolf that hunts Little Red Riding Hood, or the vampire who perpetuates his life by taking those of others. I don't want you to take me to a world where every lie I've told is suddenly real. I don't want you to make me thankful that I live here and not in the pages of some story because sometimes I need to escape. Sometimes literature is supposed to succeed in the areas where reality fails. Sometimes it's the only thing that makes living bearable."

He listened to it all without ever looking away from her. His mouth was slightly agape, his eyes at a squint as her bedroom fell silent. She could feel his stare on her like the heat of the sun, warm, enveloping, touching every exposed nerve. It was intimate, intense.

In pure, pulsing silence, he leaned forward, closing the book and sinking back down to the pillows, the hand that caressed her shoulder dragging her down with him. Quietly, he spoke.

"Literature and life are like two sides of a coin," he said. "Sometimes one appears better than the other—luckier, I guess—other times, not. But they are complements."

He showed her his hand, the fingers spread out, and she offered him her own, gingerly pressing her palm to his.

"They mirror each other," he continued, "reflect truths both ways, even if the guises they take are different. Yes, sometimes fiction makes living bearable, but it is _reality_ that injects fiction with life." Their fingers threaded and forged a bridge between them. Again, he smiled, speaking to her in that same hushed tone, feeding her the secrets of his imagination.

"My words are just words if the eyes that read them have nothing to offer in return."

She couldn't help but smile at him. She felt neither ashamed nor embarrassed that he had reversed her argument in the same way he turned worlds upside down in his stories.

"Maybe we live in a place where the line is blurry," she said, "where the two sides of the coin melt into the other."

He laughed, his eyes shining.

"Maybe we do. Maybe we do." His thumb ran over her lips. "And even if not, I would love to live there."

She tried to imagine what such a place would be like—the limbo between true and false, solid and air—and if it would carry the best of both worlds or be the grave for their shortcomings. That one night with him marked the start of their regular correspondence. He became part of her daily routine. His name replaced certain days of the week. Her hands ticked to the seconds of his clock.

They would meet during her lunch break. He would take her out to dinner after work. On weekends, she would rendezvous with him at his favorite café and sit across from him as he wrote in the sunshine and sipped at his espresso. Initially, their days and nights were filled with conversation. What she craved most from him were his words, and he, too, wheedled input out of her, admitting to her that he enjoyed listening to her speak, that she needed to do it more often.

"I just don't think I have much to say—not much worth listening to, anyway," she had told him.

"You can't seriously mean that. You're a teacher," he replied. "_Everything_ you say matters."

It was during such moments that she realized his opinions were given as statements. There was no room for doubt in his declarations, and while she admired his integrity, she had misgivings about people who spoke too decidedly. They smacked of authority and the arrogance that came with it, pulling accolades out of thin air to justify whatever they carved into stone.

As the weeks wore on, he began to see her less often, and when they met he looked distracted, agitatedly so, and the periods of silence where he wrote in her company were prolonged and inflammable. They never fought. Even if the emotion had escalated to the level of being nakedly argumentative, their words were never used to be shouted in the sentiments that separated them. She suffered him silently, wondering over his distance, when, just weeks prior, he was everything she looked forward to when she woke.

One night, he ignored her completely, and she felt like a phantom appendage to the body: invisible, but giving the illusion of presence. She called in sick to work the following day, opting instead to shut herself in her apartment. But her plans were thwarted. It was a running joke in her family that she and her brother were hopeless when it came to romantic relationships, but it was as though the stars aligned that night for them to meet and discuss their lovelorn woes.

Her brother was a successful diplomat for the United Nations, and he traveled constantly in Italian silk suits. He had just returned from a flight to Geneva, Switzerland, and while he had a girlfriend to go home to, he stopped by her apartment first. The wear of a fourteen hour flight was clear on his haggard face and mussed-up hair, but he arrived on her door front still arrayed in his suit—wrinkled though it was—and with his suitcase in hand.

She made him a pot of tea and sat at the kitchen table across from him, allowing herself to be the wall off of which he bounced ideas. During their conversation, he placed a small box on the tabletop. She opened it and found a ring.

"I just have my doubts," he said, running a hand through his hair. "Not about her," he clarified, "but about me. I wonder if I'll be able to make her happy."

His present girlfriend he had been dating for the past ten years. They had had their share of fallouts. Their relationship was the most strained when she relocated to Europe while he was still in university in Japan—a period of time so tumultuous that it extended their 'committed but as of yet unengaged' status to the decade that it currently was.

The only issue that kept her from sympathizing with her brother was the fact that he had had someone constant for the past decade. She, however, oscillated between short periods of romantic intrigue and long intervals of tortured singleness.

"Bliss isn't a permanent state, brother," she told him, somewhere between wistfully and scornfully, as if she'd just cracked open a cookie and read a fortune she cared very little for.

"I'm a little too old to be taking silly, in-the-name-of-love risks, sister," he replied.

"All risks in the name of love are silly."

Now _she_ was the one spitting platitudes. She suppressed a groan in her throat and looked down at the floor, though she could feel him staring, probably wondering—like herself—what was the matter with her.

"Did you want biscuits with your tea?" she asked, with the precise intent of avoiding the question.

Her brother knew her too well. The childhood years spent protecting her from harm and from the eager attentions of boys who had conditioned him to be keen to her expertly hidden misery.

"What's happened?" he asked.

"Nothing." She was quick to reply. A plate of tea biscuits was set in front of him before she sat back in her chair, looking out the window to keep from crying in front of him as she had done so many times previous.

"Nothing's happened," she reiterated, rubbing her forehead with her palm. "Nothing ever does."

He didn't pry her for answers during the rest of his visit, and she saw him off with a vote of support and an umbrella. It looked like it was going to rain.

"I'll let you know how things go," he said as he climbed into a taxi. She waved him goodbye and watched the taxi drive off down the street, remaining outside her apartment complex until thunder rumbled overhead.

The approach of rain was nothing to celebrate. Once the drops of water began to pelt her windows, she found no reason to move on with her evening. She closed the book she had been reading (_his_ book), dumped her cold tea into the sink, and went to take her pre-slumber shower.

She had just exited her bathroom in a bloom of mist, like the birth of Venus on a cloud of sea foam, a towel crimping dry the wet ends of her hair, when the doorbell rang. A pause followed, quick as a heartbeat, before her unexpected visitor rapped his knuckles on the panel, hard enough to rattle the chain lock.

With a sigh, she hurriedly dressed and answered the door, yanking it open, only to find _him_ standing on the opposing side, a puddle of water coagulating around his feet.

Her jaw tensed at the sight of him. His blond hair was matted to his forehead. His clothes were soaked and stuck to him like wet papier-mâché on a metal skeleton. The eyes that looked at her beneath his dripping, blond fringe were lucid and bright, moist and unshakable. She couldn't remember when a look so vexed her, made her aware of how madly she wanted something that was bad for her—like a poisoned apple.

Her heart raced as she beheld him, her body stiff as she resisted his magnetic pull, denied the lure of his presence, murmured prayers to counter the spell his attraction seamlessly wove.

He took a step forward and crossed the threshold of her home, invaded the circle of her haven. She should have recoiled, but her feet were rooted to the ground, beguiled like a wizard trapped in a tree—because of what? A beautiful face? A scowl fought repression against her twitching lips, but he reached out and touched her. His fingers roamed over her visible collar bones, glossed over the nape of her neck, and it felt like he was phasing straight through her, puncturing skin—not in the way a lancet pierced the flesh, but the way honey seeped slowly, warmly, siphoning into the comb; the way a kiss melted like wax on the lips.

It only took an instant, but she was lost, her mind flying.

The water on him was like glue. She adhered to him, pinned him to the bed. Delicately, she peeled off his clothes, shoved aside the curtain of wet hair over his eyes as she kissed him, tasting in his mouth a bittersweet irony. Kisses were supposed to break enchantments, free one from an eternal slumber, yet she felt immersed in a dream, swimming in its dark waves, finding in its black a fulfillment that challenged the vacuous nature of its hue.

Morning came like the prick of a spinning needle on the finger. Sharp. Painful. It might as well have drawn blood. The sun hit her back, and she lay on her stomach, as if she were a mermaid that had been washed ashore. But she woke alone, she could feel it, and when she turned to look at the other half of her bed, all she found was the wrinkled indent of him—like a footprint in the sand—and her copy of his stories sitting in his vacancy just as it had in weeks previous.

The book looked different in the light that filtered into her bedroom, its cover absorbing the aureate sheen of dawn. She opened it, riffling through its pages, finding nothing but her own highlights and scribbled notes. That was, until she reached the last page.

'_You have disturbed my universe_.'

The reflection, so blunt, so mystifying, written in his own hand, in unadulterated ink, froze her in time, caused some thick muscle in her heart to snap.

She scurried for a pen, pulling the cap off with her teeth before she wrote, in reply, beneath it:

'_Dare you disturb my own?_'

She took the book with her to work, keeping it stowed in a locked drawer in her desk and thinking that just because it was out of sight it would vanish from thought as well. It didn't. Looking at his niece in her classroom pushed needles of pain in her chest, forced frissons to zigzag down each fiber of her being. Every time she blinked, she would catch glimpses of him, traces of the way his hair smelled, the all-knowing blue eyes.

How she survived the day until the light of the afternoon sun waned and her classroom emptied of children, she would never know; yet, she felt compelled to stay there, sitting at her desk, pretending to grade classwork, sensitive to the ticks of the clock as seconds fell like debris into the garbage bin of Time.

For a very brief moment, she doubted he would come, but still, she remained, the rays of light receding from her windows, painting long, grey shadows horizontally across the quiet desk rows. She felt foolish, angry that she was thinking like some damsel in a tower, waiting for rescue, as if that was all her little life would amount to—waiting.

With a taut jaw, she unlocked the drawer with the book, pulling it out the instant she felt a breeze fly into the room. Her stare swerved, her neck twisted. Breathlessly, he stood by the entrance to her classroom, his blue eyes wide and wary. Ice streamed into her blood as she gazed at him, well aware of the mesmerizing powers of such a stare. She spoke before she succumbed to the magic of his silence.

"Notes are usually reserved for the flyleaf," she explained apathetically, holding her book out to him. The corner of his mouth curled minutely, like a flourish bled from the tip of a fountain pen.

"That's true," he ceded. They were the first words he'd said to her in what seemed like millennia, and they came out unremarkably trite. "But you're not exactly what I would call a fan. Nor are you my dedication."

With long, easy strides, he approached her desk and took the book from her, his eyes never leaving her own as the volume left her grasp. Without hesitation, he flipped to the very last page and instantly requested a pen, which she provided. Seconds later, the book was returned to her, the pen bookmarking the vandalized page.

'_Forgive the audacity,'_ he had written, '_but I believe I already have._'

Her eyes burned at the words scratched onto the once clean, virginal page. She said nothing in reply. A sourness collected in her mouth, the very same that oozed around the gums when the body anticipated vomiting, the alkaline warning before the body rejected whatever it had warmly welcomed within. He had the uncanny ability to rob all language from her, render her tongue but a muted instrument, suck her dry of all intelligible means of communication. The book was closed shut with a clap, and she set it gently on the top of her desk, the cover blurring in her vision.

She could count the heartbeats that passed in the abominable silence that followed, like the rests in a sonata leading up to a towering crescendo. It throbbed around them, pressing the air close and making so vital an ingredient to life an undesired necessity.

"I've angered you," he said. Flat. The words were flat. Prints on a page. Dry ink. "I've frightened you," he amended. There was a tremor in his voice, the first she had ever heard from him. In an instant, he was standing in front of her, the tips of his fingers shaking as he reached for her hand, challenging the notion that it was she who was truly afraid.

"No, no, _no_," she replied, speaking the word like a toddler who had just discovered the power in denial. "It's… _true_," she admitted, wiping at her eyes. Her face contorted. The muscles in her jaw strained to keep herself from crumbling. "_How_ you have the confidence to say it is what gets me," she sobbed, "like it's a mere gesture of a hand, a flick of the wrist."

_Like it's a habit_, she thought to herself. _And you have done this a thousand times before._

"It's not," he said, defying her. "My haughty sense of self-assurance, my conviction that I have moved the axis on which your planet spins—_I can't explain it_. It's impossible. I've _tried_. There are _millions_ of words at my disposal to describe it, but they lack the accuracy." He took her face in his hands, his palms dry and warm against her cheeks, his eyebrows furrowed in frustration. "_Don't_ think it's just your DNA unraveling when we stand in a room," he told her. "That because you are small, because you are gentle, you have no influence over anyone or anything bigger than yourself. You. All of you." The hands on her face shuddered. She could feel the shivers traveling through to his fingertips. "You are undoing me as I speak."

Her head wagged in disbelief. Her eyes pinched shut. Had there been a sight attached to so sublime a truth, it would have blinded her.

"Stop, _stop_," she pleaded, her head resting defeatedly against his chest. "I can't have done that to you," she wept, lifting her eyes bravely to meet him. A stray tear was wiped away from his cheek. "I can't. I _refuse_to have that power over you. I can't…"

He smiled, allowing himself the brief luxury of a hollow, incredulous laugh.

"It's too late," he said. "From the very first words you said to me, you cast the spell, or did you always think it was you who was bewitched? You, who could not escape?"

She grimaced, fearing the meaning of his accusations, the revelations they had the potential to ignite. Her world would be upturned if he had proof to his claims, and a part of her had already surrendered to that possibility. Her feet were ready for the floor to give way beneath. Her head waited for the roof to collapse on them both.

"Do you need a reminder?" he teased, smiling in the face of her confusion. He swallowed tightly, blinking the water clear from his eyes as he stepped back. His hand was extended to her, the palm raised on an upward angle.

The instant she recognized the gesture, she backed away in terror, ran into the wall of her chalkboard. Her head knocked on the dusty black surface. A violently shaking hand raised itself to her quivering lips.

The first touch. Its memory crashed in on her brain in giant waves, sent her reeling through a vacuum of swirling images, strings of dizzying words that could all be traced to one simple incantation.

Gradually, pathetically, she nodded. She reached for his hand, dissolving the barrier between them until such a brittle connection was abandoned in full. To him she clung, burying her face into his chest as the words she had said so long ago poured from her lips.

"_I enabled you_."

She said it thrice, hoping in its repetition to form an antidote that would clear the air, reveal them to each other for what they were; and when he gave her his reply, "Where would I be without you?", it was an astounding relief. He was her consequence, fleshly and real, and the realization was as illuminating as a bolt of lightning, refreshing as a plunge in ice water, revealing as the lifting of a veil.

She closed her eyes and pressed her lips to the area over his heart, convinced that, had they lived in a place where lines blurred, she would have been in danger of melting completely into him. But they remained separate, a true union denied by the oppression of physics and skin. The only place where they could lie beside and meld was within the hidden pages of a book—where his letters overlapped her letters, where her words begat his words, and where her enchantments flowered his stories, his universe dedicated in her name.


End file.
